1. Technical Field of the Invention
This invention relates generally to media broadcasting, and more particularly to dynamically assigning media advertising orders to any combination of previously booked and currently unbooked broadcast inventory.
2. Description of Related Art
Media stations can broadcast media content to end-users via FM, AM, Television, Cable, Satellite, or the Internet. Some media stations are “commercial free,” but require end-users to pay a periodic fee to receive that station's broadcast or stream. Other media stations broadcast content without charge to the end-users, but receive revenue from the sale of broadcast time, commonly referred to as “inventory.”
Various automated inventory management systems are available, and these systems typically map orders to available inventory using traditional factors such as demo/price efficiency, market and station balance, and fair and equal rotation. The mapping performed by current systems is generally a simple binary association, and once assigned to a unit of inventory, the mapping is fixed, and cannot change unless the automated system is bypassed and manual intervention is taken. The mapping of orders to inventory is performed on a first-come, first-served basis, and is generally performed at the time a new order is placed. Thus, once an order is mapped to a particular unit of inventory, the system makes that unit of inventory unavailable for later-submitted orders.
Additionally, conventional media advertising is based on finite and static data sets. The two primary buyer/seller processes, referred to as planning and campaign copy splitting, are generally third party audience ratings, which are estimates of a listening audience, an estimate of listening audience), and station attributes such as market, format, and time of day. The third party ratings generally change only twice a year, and in most cases broadcasters must manually approve each proposed advertising plan.
Furthermore, proper attribution of advertising can be difficult to demonstrate. For example, if a person hears an advertisement on the radio in his car, he may go home and search for the brand on the Internet, where an advertisement is displayed. In some such cases, the Internet advertisement is given credit for the exposure without taking into account that the radio advertisement should have received at least partial credit for the exposure.
A broadcast network lineup, sometimes referred to as a plan or schedule is generally considered to be a contractual order that the seller and buyer have transacted. It is usually a list of stations, weeks, day parts, and number of spots that the seller will air on behalf of the buyer. Originally broadcasting network lineups were referred to as pre-defined “wired networks.” And to make buying advertising time easier, these wired networks always offered the same lineup, and by extension the same audience. Eventually, a new network product was created to accommodate variation—“unwired networks”. Unwired networks are a customized, unique network plan based on the buyer's specification, or “spec”. A spec or specification is the set of goals the buyer wants to achieve from the media plan, for example the total budget, desired number of impressions, the time period, any station format exclusions, etc. In conventional systems, however, the spec is defined against the same finite and static data sets—third party audience and station attributes.
In both cases (wired and unwired), once the plan (station lineup) is booked or sold, it cannot change—the “spend” is guaranteed and will run as initially defined. This is a traditional limitation because with finite and static data, it is impracticable to change the plan's station lineup during an advertising campaign. Furthermore, in both cases (wired and unwired), the campaign copy rotation is limited to the station's contextual attributes—market, format, time. Besides being limited, it is operationally expensive to manage complicated copy rotation rules.
As discussed above, conventional media inventory sales and management systems, while adequate in many respects, are less than perfect.